The Dark Lights

By Nick Shamhart

Have you ever walked past a window and seen something out of the corner of your eye that you knew couldn’t be there, but you go back to check and it’s gone?
What if it wasn’t gone?
What if it was still there?
What if you could walk out your door and interact with it?
And what if you couldn’t go back?
This is the story of Erik. He is a young man who did just that. He walked through a doorway into another world and now he cannot return home. Every door he walks through could be the one that leads him back home, but the years he has spent searching have not yielded that result. Compounding matters are the Dark Lights, creatures more akin to gods than sentient man, that chase Erik as a result of his trespassing into other worlds.
Follow Erik along on his travels, and allow his spastic wit to keep you company while he compares the cosmos to pop culture, falls in love, examines the concepts of fear, desire, anger, compassion, courage, and the entire gamut of the human experience.
Open a door onto another world, and run!

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Sep 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9781483558721

Book preview

Author

1

Is it possible to wander so far and for so long that you forget where it was that you began? I’m afraid that I have. In fact, I’m freaking terrified that’s the case. I really am. That idea, that possibility chases me down. It hunts me like a faceless predator – a rasping, panting, and salivating monster. Something evil born of nightmares, destined to devour hope … and dreams. Ideas can do that you know. They can just tear your dreams apart like a monster. Mostly I dream of home. If it still exists. If it’s really the same thing I’m remembering or if I’ve made it up to keep me sane. If my family is still alive. If they remember me. If I can remember them. If I can remember where it is … or was. Yeah, those are pretty big ifs. But you know what? I’ve learned that a hell of a lot of things are. Just big old ifs.

Erik. Yep, Erik, that’s what they called me. That’s my name. Well… at least I’m pretty sure it is. It’s been a lifetime since anyone called me by it. I’ve been known by many names since. Some of them I’m pretty sure were very unflattering. Others were better. Maybe. I hope. I can’t really be sure. You see, they were in different languages. Only one world speaks English as far as I’ve found. We flatter ourselves and say that English is a universal language. Well let me tell you, I’ve been all around the universe and nobody else seems to know what the word dude means. I have to admit that maybe Gruff wasn’t the compliment I thought it was since I had no idea what the people who called me it had said. It could have meant jackass, moron, tool, or wiener to them. But hey, look, if you don’t mind I’m going to just go on deluding myself though, and remember it as something cool. I was Gruff!

But no matter the translation or inflection that accompanied me in other worlds, at home I was Erik. Nothing cool. Not Erik the Red. I have dark brown hair and brown eyes, and being called Erik the Brown either sounds racist or like I have incontinence issues. Not Erik the Strong. I mean come on! I don’t often find myself confronted with a scale (not that it would be in measurements I could read anyway, right?), but I can’t weigh more than a buck fifty soaking wet and most of that is lanky legs. So strong by any stretch of the imagination is out. Not Erik the Brave. No, never Erik the Brave. Jesus! Do you know what happens to brave people? They die. Bravery gets you good and dead so run the hell away from being brave if you want to live. Me, I run, ran, kept running, and any other tense of the word you can think of for fleeing like a coward. Erik the Spineless. Yeah, that’s definitely me. Erik the Pansy. Probably. I’m not sure what a pansy is exactly, but it sounds right. Erik the Wimp. Can’t argue there either. Erik the Pussy? Well, a man has to draw the line somewhere, right? It may be an appropriate moniker, but come on. Let’s just say craven, yellow-belly, and scaredy-cat work fine and dandy too, so we’ll leave it at that … for now.

Or, to begin with I guess. For now. For later. Whatever. It all depends on how you look at things. On how well you respond to those ifs. My cowardice was the beginning of my end, and the end of my beginning. If you look at it from different perspectives. If. If. If. Aw hell, I don’t want to confuse you too much at the start, having just met and all. I’m not really that smart of a guy. Don’t go thinking this is a story full of sophistication and intellectuality and stuff like that. I’m not that guy. It’s just that the ifs are important. They influence a lot of our thinking and color our perspectives. Always remember the ifs.

But, um well no matter the ifs. I guess you can forget about them for now, or maybe not. Maybe they are important. I don’t know. What is important is that when I was thirteen years old I ran out the backdoor of the only home I had ever known … and I’ve spent the rest of my life trying to get back.

2

It all started when I was young. I mean really young. Sesame Street, Scooby Doo, and Superman underwear that kind of young. Maybe seven or eight? I don’t know. It could have been earlier, but most people (myself included) don’t remember much more than static images of our past before that age. At least not enough to really give you an accurate recounting of anything. I remember that my parents’ house had those higher windows. You know the type, right? Not some church-like clerestory windows. Not insanely high or anything, but high enough ones that I couldn’t see out of them as a kid without standing on a chair. You see them a lot in split-level homes. I think they were big in the 60’s and 70’s. So to be tall enough (or at least strong enough to drag a chair over to one) I must have been eight, or maybe even nine. How old I actually was doesn’t matter. I know people always want specifics, but the details don’t really mean shit, do they? Details obscure the truth as much as they tell it sometimes.

What does matter, the detail you need and shouldn’t overlook, isn’t how old I was when I started looking out of windows, but what I saw when I did. I think it might be important that it didn’t begin until I could look out the windows without help. I saw what I saw without some adult figure lifting me up and telling me what I was supposed to see. Do you get my drift? No external influences saying look Erik, a car, a tree, a school bus, or whatever. I saw and decided on what it was I was seeing.

I can’t pinpoint the first time exactly. With what I was seeing I’m not sure that’s even possible. Even now it isn’t like every time I look out of a window I see the burning depths of a cavernous Hell-like place, or the distant glowing lights of some city that doesn’t exist where I’m currently standing. Yeah, that only happens sometimes. Not all the time. Even then those are some of the extremes. Maybe all I’ll see is a rabbit with three ears. Something weird, but not Lovecraftian. Typically though I could walk by a window in say the American Midwest and see a vast roaring ocean. That’s only out of place if you know where you are, and most times I don’t. See what I mean? If I see something weird I need some context, and most days I don’t have it. Most days everything is freaking weird to me. It’s why I’m a coward. It’s why I run.

I think most people can do what I do … to a certain point. That is, see different worlds. Not to the extreme and with the clarity that I am cursed with, but they can still do it. It happens most often when you’re just passing by with a thousand other things on your mind, right? I think we’ve all done that. And it’s also not the full vista panorama of someplace else that I end up seeing. I’m sure you don’t see that either. I mean if you do hey great! You’re not alone. We could start a club. But most people just catch a glimpse of something in passing that only registers in their mind as that shouldn’t be there well after they’ve passed it. It might be an animal that has no natural business strolling around your yard, or it could be something odd and indefinable, something from an alien reality altogether that sticks out in your mind like a blister. A few purple deer-like creatures that are there and gone again. Then they get translated in your mind as a sensory delay, or that feeling of déjà vu you hear hippies, crystal ball, and tea leaf reading people rambling on about. Wow, your energy is like really out of alignment, man. But rational, grown up people don’t believe what they saw actually existed. No that’s just crazy talk, right?

The small stuff is always the most common. The details. The ifs. They don’t matter and they do. Wacky, huh? Once that sense of incongruity registers you back-peddle to the window, forgetting for a moment all those other things that were on your mind, and look for what struck you as wrong. You never see it again, of course, your glimpse was momentary … and you missed it thanks to worries about money, relationships, or some other personal drama. So, your overworked mind goes back to those thousands of useless thoughts and files the image away as sensory delay or the play of light and shadows. You never see that other world again. Maybe in your dreams your subconscious decides to dig those images back up and mess with your head bit. You ever wake up thinking, where the fuck did that come from? Well, maybe you actually saw it once, but convinced yourself that you didn’t. Self-delusion is better for bliss than ignorance let me tell you. Been there, done that.

So that’s what it’s like for most people. They go back to regular old trees, squirrels, and the neighbor’s dog taking a crap on their front lawn. Everything is right with the world and all makes sense.

If I see something odd in a window and back-peddle to double-check? Well, there’s no guesswork or forgetting. No self-delusion for old Erik the Cowardly. It doesn’t go away. The images that would fracture the sanest of minds comes to me live and better than Technicolor and IMAX. I see it all. It stays there for me to examine and wonder about. Aren’t I just the luckiest of bastards?

As a boy I used to think everything I saw out the windows was really there, and it only stood to reason that everybody else could see it too. Kids are like that, aren’t they? They believe Santa Claus is real so you, the grown-ups around them, just automatically believe he exists too, right? Childhood, it’s a world where emotional trust meets innocence and a sprinkling of inexperience is tossed in to boot. Kids see more of the world around them because they aren’t burdened by the ifs of adulthood. The ifs aren’t a thought. It’s the whys that rule the children’s world.

I was sick a lot as a child. Not with any particular illness, at least not one I ever learned a specific name for. Not the biggies anyway. Not cancer or HIV or the things everybody knows. What was it I had? I can’t remember what they called it (They had to call it something. Because we have to have a name for everything, right? Insurance companies don’t pay out if there isn’t a name for what’s wrong). It had something to do with my immune system just being plain old fashioned weak. Yay genetics! My mom used to say that my body liked to try different diseases and viruses like a gourmet chef sampling different foods. If any cold, flu, or fever was going around my school or neighborhood you could bet I’d catch it.

Seizures were a big part of my life, too. Odd lighting could trigger them. Dietary insufficiencies could trigger them. The freaking TV could trigger them for God’s sake! Imagine being a kid in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and not being allowed to watch more than a snippet of TV at a time? Anything longer than a half-hour program and my mom would start freaking out. I mean – No TV! – that’s what most parents used as a punishment for my friends and that was my daily life. Just like any normal kid though, I snuck in as much of the old boob tube as I could. My choices were limited to the times I could sneak it in though, so I mostly watched bad late-night movies, or reruns of television shows that were filmed before I was born, or cartoons (Warner Brothers seemed to have sold the animated antics of their legendary menagerie to any television station that was willing to broadcast them), or those horrid infomercial things, or well pretty much anything else I could watch when nobody was home or awake. I mean come on! What happens when your parents tell you not to do something? That’s right, you do it anyway. Too bad they didn’t tell me that vegetables were the evil spawn of Satanic Republican cults that ate puppy dogs for breakfast and never to touch them. Call it reverse psychology if you like, but it works on adults too, man! Tell them they shouldn’t do something and they’ll freaking do it every time.

Books were okay though. My mom used to say that print on a page never gave anybody a seizure. So I read and read. It was annoying at first because I struggled, hankering and yearning for the easy electrical sustenance that television provided like any good digitized and materialized child should. But, to be honest, after I hit my teen years and my vocabulary and repertoire expanded, and the knowledge the books provided grew in relation to the amount I read, they ended up being a larger comfort to my solitary existence. Illnesses and seizures had pulled me out of attending school in person and I’d been relegated to tutors and home schooling for my own safety. My mind became my playground since the real playground might kill me.

It’s a strange state that you find yourself in when you only interact with the world vicariously through a different medium. I had some friends sure, but as they grew older and could do all those cool things teenagers do I was left behind. It didn’t matter because they were never as close to me, never as important to me as those that danced about in pixelated glory on the screen, or the ones that I created in my head from the characters in the stories I read. Those friends never failed me. They couldn’t. They were a part of me. If things looked like they were about to go to shit I just changed the ending, changed their actions in my head, and then they were my best of friends again.

In my solitary, constant fear of seizure, world I saw the outside as just that – outside. Inside I could create the sunny day that the rain outside was blocking, or fill the back yard with snow to go sledding when it was the middle of summer. Sometimes, when I passed the windows on our stairs one would show me the dog day of summer where my sister was playing with her friends in our backyard. Then I’d walk down a few steps and the next window showed me a frozen winter wonderland. You can see how that became confusing to me. Was I seeing another world, or was it wishful thinking and imagination on my part?

That’s my childhood in a nutshell, being stuck at home sick, staring out our many windows because the world put on the only show I could watch for any length of time without my mom bitching at me that it was literally frying my brain. Sadly most of the time the things and places I saw out of a window were better and more interesting than where I was. Granted that’s not exceptionally difficult if you’ve ever been to suburbia. Sure Mr. Henderson’s pale-white beer gut flopping around over his jeans as he mowed the lawn next door had an indefinable, mesmerizing quality, but every time he turned around to complete a row his ass crack peeking out from those same jeans looked like he was smuggling a black chinchilla squished between two flat watermelons, well, it tended to ruin the entertainment … and your lunch.

After years I started looking for the fantastical vistas and ignored the commonplace ones. But, sadly, it seemed that every time I saw someplace interesting out of a window I was stuck inside, sick, weak, and damaged. The few times that I was allowed outside when the windows showed me something different than say my front or backyard, and thankfully not Mr. Henderson’s ass crack, I would race out the nearest door only to find the world I had seen in the window had been replaced with our yard. Yeah, or Mr. Henderson.

I’m sure you’ve had times that you wanted to escape, right? We all do. It seems like the world and your place in it just sucks. Sucks. Sucks. Sucks. Can’t do anything with what you have, and nothing seems to be coming along to change that anytime soon. Sucks. Sucks. Sucks. You’d like nothing more than to open your front door onto a lavender sand beach with deep indigo waters lapping at a moon-lit surf. You can feel the warm sand under your toes right now, can’t you? The breeze has that gentle coolness that suggests you might want a jacket in another hour or two, but right then it’s perfect. The soft susurrus of the water reminds you of someplace safe and secure. The air is redolent with the smells of saltwater. On that beach there are no cares, no worries, nothing to suck. So unless you’re there right now, I can’t imagine where you’re sitting is any better. You’d be crazy not to drop everything and rush off to that alien beach if you could, right? Well crazy or not, let me tell you, getting there is one thing. Getting back? That’s a whole other story.

3

I had a dog that died when I was thirteen. What a silly, stupid detail to remember, huh? I don’t know the proper name of the illness that plagued my early life, but I can remember how old I was when my dog died. Funny how those things can stick in the back of your mind. I can even remember that it was Fourth of July weekend. The fireworks scared her and she snapped her chain. My dad found her a mile down the road, dead, run over by a car. Sometimes I wonder if she is still dead. Maybe when I walk through a door into a different world I can also walk through time. Who knows, right? I mean at this point in my life I’d believe just about anything was possible. I’ve seen dancing green elephants the size of Chihuahuas (Pretty cool huh? You can go ahead and be jealous of that). On the flipside of awesome I’ve also seen small monkey-like people that used their poop for that world’s version of mud wrestling. So what’s a little time travel compared to that?

Then again, it could be that she did die. That all of my family died and where I’m sitting now could very well be centuries in the future … or … or maybe it’s the past. Maybe they haven’t even been born yet. Wow that’s a wacky thought, huh? Maybe where I’m sitting, right now, on a semi-rotting, over-turned whiskey barrel, eating my stolen lunch … maybe right here in this world I haven’t been born yet. Fucks with your mind a bit, doesn’t it?

But that’s all just guesswork that doesn’t really matter anyway. The ifs. The details. I can’t control where I go or even when it happens. So forget about it. Don’t let those questions mess with your mind too much. Let’s focus on what I can do. I randomly walk through a door and find myself somewhere else. That sounds niftier than it actually is, trust me. I’ve lived as long as years in places before it happens again. But, that’s not all that common, mind you. Most of the time I’m only in one place for a week or two. Maybe a little more maybe a little less. A week only makes sense to you and me. Other places don’t use our silly measurements of time. However that length of time is measured, the world I’m on travels around its sun for a bit and then I just keep on running. Running. Running. Running. Just running from place to place. Finding food and shelter where I can and taking it when I can’t.

Erik the Runner. It’s not much of a life … but it’s a life.

I’ve been called that before – Erik the Runner. Janus just shortens it to Runner. She uses it like a … Who is Janus? Oh yeah, sorry, I guess that would help wouldn’t it? I tend to ramble. It’s what happens when you only have yourself to keep you company most of the time. So if I bring up a place or person I haven’t before be sure to stop me.

Where was I? Janus, right! So, after years and years of bumping into to her in different worlds and realities, I’ve come to the conclusion that "What is Janus?" would be the better question than who. Like so many questions we have, I think the answer isn’t something we can understand. We might try. We might want to know. We might balk at the idea that humans are too limited to really comprehend certain things. But just because we don’t want to believe that we can’t understand something that doesn’t make it so we can. Or, to put it another way, you can’t make yourself into something you’re not by stubbornness alone.

At first I thought Janus was just a woman with the same abilities as me. A woman with a really messed up case of bipolar disorder, let me tell you, but still a woman. One minute